Work

I’ve never had a proper job before. Freelance doesn’t count – because I wasn’t any good at it, because I can’t work from home. My entire work history as follows consists of this:

A Paper Round (13)

Working Saturdays in the shop my mum worked in (16, did this for one calendar year)

Misc semi-completed web sites (And yes, Mike, I will finish yours)

Working the occasional day or evening in the same shop as mentioned above

So I’m working properly for the first time ever, which – at 21 – is not really anything to shout home about, I suppose. So what am I doing? Basically, my job currently consists of recreating the templates for all the screens in a PDA game in Paint Shop Pro 7 (The originals are jpegs, and the wrong size), getting the design approved by the head designer, cutting out all the various buttons and items so that the programmers have some dummy images to work with until the finalised design happens, and then marking the X and Y co-ordinates and height/width for each image on a sheet. The measurements have to be pixel perfect, so the programmers can work from them and the head designer can use the template to build the final pages

This week we have discovered that the advertised resolution for the PDAs of 240*320 (240*268 usable by applications) was wrong, and the actual dimensions (Discovered by putting a checkerboard pattern on the screen and counting dots) are 240*256. Having redesigned all the layouts to accommodate the 12 pixel overflow, the programmers then worked out this was a feature of the code rather than the PDA, and fixed it. This lost us a certain amount of time.

The worst part about it all is the travel. I have to leave at quarter past eight to get into town (There is a bus, but since I spent 40 minutes waiting for it (it allegedly comes every 10) I now ignore it) to catch the 8:45 bus to Histon (My house to work is about seven miles all told. How I know this detail is apparent later). Even if this bus is on time, I get to the office at 9am on the dot, and it’s been on time once. Once this week I’ve had to get a taxi (